• Luke Harding
• guardian.co.uk, Sunday 10 October 2010 00.08 BST
• Article history

Uzbek children sit at their destroyed house in Osh, as Kyrgyzstan prepares for elections. Photograph: Vasily Fedosenko/Reuters

There was no arrest warrant, no warning. At 5am, 10 Kyrgyz police officers rushed the flimsy tent where Bakha, an ethnic Uzbek, had been sleeping. They dragged him away and drove off. Bakha’s small son was discovered by relatives several hours later, terrified, weeping and alone.

“They are like the Gestapo,” Bakha’s older brother Rustam said, recalling his brother’s brutal arrest last month.

Four months after ethnic violence erupted in southern Kyrgyzstan, with 2,000 Uzbeks murdered in a series of shadowy state pogroms, Kyrgyz security agencies are continuing to persecute Uzbeks, Rustam said.

Uzbeks complain of arbitrary detention, mistreatment in custody, legal abuses and extortion. But local Kyrgyz officials now blame the minority Uzbek population for unleashing the unrest. The police and other agencies continue to pounce on Uzbek youths, often demanding money, Rustam said.

“My brother had just sold his car for $5,000. Two days later, he was arrested. This wasn’t a coincidence. The police told his wife to pay them $1,500. In return they say they will drop murder charges against him,” he alleged. “They want to get rid of us. But where are 1.5 million [Uzbek] people supposed to go?”

As Kyrgyzstan holds an election today for a new parliament, the country’s future is uncertain. The violence, from 10 to 15 June, was the worst in central Asia for a decade.

Pessimists predict Kyrgyzstan – which hosts a US and a Russian airbase – could become a failed state, sucking in drugs, organised crime, Islamic radicalism and other destabilising influences from Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Others take a brighter view. In a post-Soviet neighbourhood ruled by autocratic strongmen, Kyrgyzstan is the freest country in the region, they point out. Today’s election could consolidate this democratic spark. Or alternatively it could ignite another round of political upheaval, in a country that has seen two revolutions in five years, including the ousting in April of Kyrgyzstan’s president, Kurmanbek Bakiyev.

“This, irony of ironies, is the most liberal country in central Asia. People lose sight of that,” one western diplomat said. There are 29 parties taking part in today’s poll, with 3,000 candidates running for 120 mandates. Osh was yesterday plastered with rival billboards in what appears to be a genuine political contest. Kyrgyz television was full of delightfully amateurish party political broadcasts.

If successful, the vote will establish central Asia’s first parliamentary democracy. The new government’s urgent task will be to avoid further inter-ethnic conflict and to overcome deep political divisions. Then there are the neighbours. Russia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan all take a dim view of the democratic experiment unfolding on their doorstep.

In the volatile south, tensions between Uzbek and Kyrgyz continue to smoulder. Bakha, now in jail, lives in Osh, Kyrgyzstan’s second city, and the epicentre of June’s disorder. Until his detention 16 days ago he had been camping out in a UNHCR tent next to the ruins of his home. A Kyrgyz mob led by soldiers had burned down his house. The pattern was repeated elsewhere: with 2,000 houses torched, and 400,000 forced to flee.

Today many residents in Osh’s Cheremushki district still live amid the rubble. The Uzbek district was once prosperous. Most of its spacious family villas are now blackened shells.

Many Uzbeks said they didn’t intend to take part in the election. “I’m not going to vote,” one resident, Ibeg, explained, drinking tea in the wreck of his home with his elderly mother. He added: “They burned down my house. They killed my neighbour. They wanted to kill my family. They are all involved.” Their kitchen garden was destroyed in the blaze.

“We are morally and physically broken,” another resident, Uzbek Kirgizbaev, said, pointing to the spot where his neighbour, a young woman called Zarifa, was hacked to death. “Most people just sit at home. If they go out on the street they risk being arrested,” he said.

In a nearby house six children were burned to death while hiding with their mother in a cellar, he added.

According to Kirgizbaev, many young Uzbeks have left to find jobs in Russia. Some 460 Uzbeks from Osh are being held in police jails. Others are being kept in a basement prison run by the SNB, Kyrgyzstan’s security agency.

Kyrgyz law-enforcement officials have charged the Uzbeks with inciting ethnic hatred, mass disorder and complicity in murder. So far, no Kyrgyz suspects have been arrested. Human Rights Watch and other groups have expressed alarm at the apparently one-sided nature of the investigation. They have also raised concerns about Azimjon Askarov, an Uzbek human rights activist sentenced to life in prison last month.

Kyrgyzstan’s temporary government says Kyrgyz perpetrators will face justice in due course. President Rosa Otunbayeva has invited a 52-strong international force from the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe to police Osh. So far, however, the OSCE mission has not arrived, with Otunbayeva apparently bowing to nationalist pressure, and with Osh still under the control of its Bakiyev-era mayor.

Observers note that harassment of Uzbeks in Osh is nothing new. The police force, procurator and city administration are all Kyrgyz, with Uzbeks – who formed the mercantile class – not represented. The precise causes of June’s pogroms are still a mystery. But it is clear that many Kyrgyz, whose nomadic forefathers lived in yurts, have long been jealous of better-off Uzbek neighbours.

The question for Rustam and other fearful Uzbeks is whether the Kyrgyz mobs will return. The omens are not good. Last month a gang of drunken Kyrgyz youths turned up at the bottom of his road on horseback, shouting racial abuse, Rustam said. He went on: “I don’t know how this genocide will end. We survived three days of war. They stole everything and burned down the house. And now they have my brother.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/10/kyrgyzstan-uzbek-osh-ethnic-cleansing